By Days after Governor Ademola Adeleke’s decisive re-election win, the All Progressives Congress in Osun State is fighting a battle on a second front, this time within its own ranks. Party leadership has moved to shut down a growing chorus of internal finger-pointing aimed at Gboyega Oyetola, the immediate past governor and now Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, over the party’s poor showing at the August 15 poll.
A Petition Sparks the Row
The trouble began when a group calling itself the Osun APC Stakeholders Forum wrote to President Bola Tinubu accusing Oyetola of effectively taking over the party’s structures in the state and distributing roughly 332 federal appointments and elective slots to loyalists well over a year before Osunites went to the polls. The petition, first reported by OSUN DEFENDER, framed Oyetola as the man most responsible for the party’s failure to reclaim the governor’s seat from Adeleke, who ran on the Accord platform and defeated APC’s Bola Oyebamiji by a wide margin.
Party Leadership Pushes Back
The state chapter of APC did not take the accusation lying down. In a statement issued on Friday through its Director of Media and Information, Kola Olabisi, the party dismissed the wave of newspaper pieces and circulating video messages targeting its leaders as unhelpful noise at a delicate moment, arguing that the priority now should be closing ranks ahead of the presidential election billed for January. Olabisi acknowledged that some members had genuine grievances after working hard for the party only to watch the result go the other way, but he described the organised effort to lay blame at particular leaders’ feet as uncharitable and rebellious.
More striking was the counter-accusation buried in the same statement: that the loudest voices now demanding accountability were, by the party’s own account, the very people who quietly worked against APC’s candidate and in favour of Adeleke during the election, whether through deliberate inaction or outright sabotage. The party did not name names, but the implication was clear enough that it amounted to an accusation of betrayal from within.
Reading Between the Lines
The episode captures a familiar pattern in Nigerian party politics after a bruising loss: rather than a clean post-mortem, the aftermath becomes its own contest, with factions jostling to control the narrative before it hardens into political fact. For APC in Osun, the timing carries extra weight. With a presidential election only months away, a state party unable to agree on why it lost risks heading into the next cycle still nursing an open wound rather than a settled strategy.
Whether the appeal for unity holds will likely depend on what, if anything, comes of the Stakeholders Forum’s petition to the presidency. For now, the state party’s message to its own members is unambiguous: air your grievances quietly, or not at all, but stop making Oyetola the public face of a defeat that, by the party’s own telling, may have had contributors far closer to home.
